Showing posts with label Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Review. Show all posts

Starward Rogue: AuGMENTED Expansion. Mech Themed Bullet Hell Rogue Like Action From Arcen Games

Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: , ,


Greetings and Salutations I'm briefly breaking my hiatus today with the hopes that I continue to produce more posts in the foreseeable future, though I am still in hospital undergoing cancer treatment and preparing for possible Stem Cell treatment.
Before I begin I wish to thank Chris Lee and those at Arcen games for providing this pre release copy of their latest expansion Starward Rogue: AuGMENTED.
For those of you unfamiliar with Arcen Games it is a tiny video games company founded in March 2009 by Christopher M. Park – CEO, Lead Programmer and Lead Designer, the company is best known for its real time strategy game AI War: Fleet Command though in recent years the company has undergone financial difficulty due to poor sales in its last two releases, TheLast Federation (an absolutely fantastic Strategy in my option and one of Arcen's best see my first impressions and review Here & Here) and Starward Rogue a scifi themed bullet hell roguelike combination set in the same universe and with the protagonist of The Last Federation.
While both games were of excellent quality their low sales highlighted one of the many issues small companies face through digital distribution through platforms such as Steam and how difficult it can be to advertise. This was especially true in the case of Starward Rogue which had the unfortunate issue of its release coinciding with a time when the roguelike genre was been flooded with low quality, low effort Steam Greenlight games which swamped the front pages of Steam.
Thankfully Arcen Games returned to their diamond in the rough with regular updates and content patches cumulating with with this latest expansion.

Available from January 24th 2018 for $6.99 Starward Rogue: AuGMENTED boasts a new floor type named the gold floor with unique challenges and rewards and in addition also has:
  • 4 new music tracks composed by Pablo Vega and The Overthinkers.
  • 3 new mechs: The Zephyr, The Paladin, and the Warhog.
  • 90+ new items.
  • 30+ new enemies.
  • 125+ new rooms.
  • 8 new room obstacles such as the pulse trap and the flamethrower turret.
  • 10+ challenge rooms, a new room type exclusive to the gold floors.
  • 6 new minibosses.
  • 9 new bosses.
If you'd like to learn more please watch the video below or continue reading for a more detailed review 


Presentation

Arcan Games have always simple “less is more” approach to sprite design which is heavily evident in Starward Rogue, each player mech and enemy has been designed with bold simple colours and thick outlines which really helps them stand out from the darker backgrounds and glowing energy bullets.
Whilst it gives them a simplest appearance artistically from a design standpoint it is an elegant solution to a common problem within most bullet hell games, even so each of the mechs really stand out individually and the various droids the player battles whilst having a unifying theme are quite unique with a minimum amount of use of recolours by the designer (about 2-3 with most droids). Though if I have one gripe its that several of the invincible turrets don't really stand out from the droids to a new player.
The most identifying feature about each droid are their attack patterns and the variety of colours and shapes that make up the various attack patterns, resisting the current tend of over the top effects and giant particle effects Arcen has once again kept things simple. Instead the neon glow of the bullets is a suitable level with the effects not extending outside of the hitbox (something that far too many game do), also Arcen have not limited themselves to the typical circles, lines and triangle type of bullets there are some very large and weird shapes that you'll find yourself running from.

Focusing once more on those aforementioned backgrounds the artwork tends to be better shaded and detailed than the interactive elements of the game giving them a somewhat cartoony appearance in compression which may put off some but to me was very reminiscence of the run and gun games of the 80s and 90s such as Alien Breed for the Amiga but with much clearer HUD design that doesn't interfere with gameplay. 

 Again both these design choices seems to be focused on ensuring enjoyable bullet hell style of game play by minimising many of the common visual problems associated with the genre which I personally appreciated whilst playing. Believe me nothing is more frustrating in a bullet hell style shooter then dying because the bullets were not visible because they blended into the background or losing of the player character for similar reasons.

With only 4 music tracks for the levels (not including the boss battle theme) Starward Rogue did need some additional tracks, while the small number of floors for each run (5 & 7 respectively) did mitigate this somewhat it does become noticeable if doing several games in a row.
Starward Rogue: AuGMENTED addition of 4 more tracks is very welcome and personally prefer these new songs to the originals with EMT-ChillBronze been a particular favourite, but overall when playing you'll usually be too busy with the action to truly listen to the music and instead the rhythm encourages a fast paced style of play.
Gameplay

As you may have gathered from the review so far Arcen have tailor the experience of Starward Rogue to focus on smooth fast paced gameplay and the attention to detail really shows.

More insane than Boatmurdered is a claim not to be taken lightly
The controls are responsive and intuitive whether using keyboard and mouse or Xbox controller, a failure to evade is always in the hands of the player (or bad luck) and if a weapon is slow to fire then it is a purposeful property of the weapon. There is no artificial difficulty via slippy movement or button delay which is a welcome relief from some of the other examples of the bullet hell genre I've played, difficulty comes at less player health and fast complex bullet patterns. (Don't let the video fool you I was playing very easy mode and the enemy bullets are slowed at that setting.)
With the three new mechs the Zephyr, the Paladin and the Warhog bringing the total number of available mechs up to a total of 12, each with a unique set of abilities and level up options. Those wanting to challenge themselves will find plenty of new opportunities to experiment with play styles for these new mechs as each takes an existing play style and adds a twist to the gameplay.

The light armed and armoured Zephyr emphasizes fast gun and run game play ideal for speed runners, the beginning each level with a slew of bonuses that slowly tick down each minute until they are completely gone after 5 minutes forcing fast reactions and a rush to the boss.

The poster boy/mech of AuGMENTED the Paladin is another close range fighter to join the Flame Tank though its energy sword allows for greater range with its beam projection actually striking the enemy with the sword does far greater damage. Its secondary weapon is an energy shield to soak up the hits as you move in closer to engage and each floor you begin with an healing item however you lose 10% of your credits, making it difficult to save up for various upgrades.

Last but not least is the Warhog who sacrifices speed for attack power and begins play with a powerful shotgun, the ability to place a pair of turrets and a single missile launcher attack that grows more powerful with each missile collected before its ability of reducing all damage by 1 is taken into account. This allows the Warhog to steamroll its way through easier early levels however in the later game or harder difficulty settings where evasion is key to survive the Warhogs reduced speed makes surviving a difficult challenge.
This is not taking account of all the various weapons and upgrades that be found in the game, Starward Rogue already had an impressive array of available weapons and items and AuGMENTED simply builds upon this whilst also patching several of the more buggy items (range extending/reducing items have all but been removed).

I personally highly approve of the energy system that the game implements for its secondary weapons, in many shoot em ups special weapons are things to be conserved but in Starward Rogue the energy for these secondary weapons replenishes each floor which actively encourage experimentation and replayablity.
Likewise the new enemies and floors some of which were designed by Arcen games own Starward Rogue community all further this aspect which is Starward Rogues greatest strength though this does come at cost.
At its heart Starward Rogue is a very short roguelike favouring short gaming sessions rather than the long playtimes or endless grinds other roguelikes often prefer, only 5 floors of action or 7 once the game has been successfully completed three times. This one huge unlock contains lots and lots of new content within the game but then there are only a few other things with no visual feedback when the player finally unlocks them.
However this new content is most focused on additional enemy variants and the developers are on record stating “ That's something we'd like to improve in the future, if we can.” AuGMENTED fills the gap with its new golden floors and new challenge rooms but overall there are still a few weaknesses.
While the story for this style of game is usually a excuse plot Starward Rogues initially builds up to be something more, unfortunately this suffered from the funding issue during the development and now there is still no real plot or explanation within the game of Rodney or the monolith even to the ending which was lacking. The developers had expressed a desire to fix this with AuGMENTED if time and funding allowed but from my experience no development has been done however if sales do well I certainly see Arcen games returning to Starward Rogue to finally fix this detail due to their respectable history of support for their older games.
Overall Starward Rogue is a game that wants the player to enjoy the journey than focus on the finish, players expecting a grand epic of a roguelike may be disappointed by the lack of story detail and simplistic level system but those wanting a arcade style of play more reminiscent of the bullet hell genre will not be left wanting. This latest release of AuGMENTED really does help fuel the adrenaline fuelled action in this quirky combination of genres.
Pros
  • Well developed blend of genres taking best elements of the bullet hell and roguelikes while removing the worst.
  • Unusual genre combination (originally) and is still one of the best examples of the style to date.
  • Wide array of weapons and foes to test them on without the worry of ammo constraints.
  • Catchy fast paced music that suits the games theme and feel well.
  • Great for short gaming sessions.
  • Good modding community with developer feedback.
Cons

  • Visual style can be unappealing to some with its simplicity.
  • Story features not implemented due to lack of funding during initial development but may be patched in depending on success of latest release.
  • Due to point 2 completion of game may feel unrewarding for those wanting more beyond the gameplay.
  • Success can be luck based.
  • Level up system may feel primitive to those wanting or used to a more in depth system
  • Relatively short gameplay for each individual run with no apparent unlocks for completion of the runs (beyond unlocking a 7 floor run).


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Silverain Reviews: Cherry Tree High Comedy Club

Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: , ,



Created by 773 Cherry Tree High Comedy Club mixes up the RPG Maker formula creating this RPG/Visual Novel crossover. Indeed Cherry Tree High Comedy Club is all but unrecognisable as an RPG maker game and is regarded as one of the most impressive examples of what the software can be used for outside of its more traditional game styles.

Comedy fanatic and high school student Mairu Hibisu has decided to set up a comedy club in her school, but the school rules require a minimum of 5 students to set up a new club and Mairu is 3 people short! Spring break has just started and Mairu has until the end of April to recruit the 3 new members she needs to start the club or her rival Chitose will have the last laugh! 
 Hard to believe this is a RPG Maker Game
The gameplay focuses on story through character interaction as you walk around town, meet people, and try to talk to them and make friends. Mechanically this is done by levelling your conversation skills in different subjects by reading magazines, attending talks or watching television/movies. Each of the 6 possible candidates that are introduced throughout the month the game takes place in have their own preferences in topics with some topics earning their friendship quicker while others simply waste the little time you have.
It should be said though that the conversation system is somewhat simple and in some ways quite unfair, the method of learning which topics are worth while for each person is down to a mixture of random chance through causal conversation (e.g. chatter that does not take time or contribute to friendship), educated guesswork from observing the various cut-scenes or simply using the option after which the result is recorded on the persons profile page in the options.
However as each major conversation option can only be used once per person other than the gossip option which can be used repeatedly (and is nearly useless) this information only helps in subsequent playthroughs, though the new game+ option is only accessible if a minimum of 3 people are convinced to join the club otherwise its a simple restart after 3 to 5 hours with none of the conversational skill levels or information gathered.


 I do like the various menus and huds in the game, the various comments often brought a chuckle
Speaking of skill levels even if you guess the favoured topics of your would-be members if the topics level is rather low you will have little gain in friendship making the most ideal method of play spending the early game addressing the additional minor needs such as completing homework on time, earning money while minimizing your fatigue level, and taking advantage of free methods of levelling topics before focusing on just 3 people to join the club.
The result of this is a average of 2 to 3 playthroughs to get the best ending where all six candidates join the club though as there is no player input to the story the player will be forced to repeatedly watch the same cut scenes and dialogue. 
The story isn't bad by any means, each character has their own goals and personal issues that they want to address but what stood out was that our protagonist Mairu Hibisu (or Miley Verisse in the westernised version) doesn't magically solve everyone's problems. In fact in most cases problems still exist but the various characters take their own steps towards fixing them, Mairu simply acts as a catalyst through her actions or occasionally a throw away comment that has a deeper affect than she realises. Its a nice alternative to much of today's story telling but does have the affect of making the game feel a little shallow and short with the Player an observer rather than having any actual effect.
For a game about Comedy and whose menus and descriptions are filled with small titbits of amusing descriptions the dialogue itself is relatively lacking in these regards in both the original and westernised versions with Mairu's outlandish behaviour often been used as a source of comedy (like most high school animes) but often falls a bit flat of the mark. In the westernised version is in the same vein as the Ace Attorney games more effort has been put into gag names and hand waving why obviously Japanese elements such as a shrine are in 'America' which might amused some players but personally this has always been a particular pet peeve of mine.   

Pros:
  • Nice visual art style through the game and a clear informative hud with lots of little details that contain much of the games humour.
  • Visually attractive and clear in design for menus and most mechanics are explained adeptly in easy to understand tutorials.
  • Unique gameplay, suitable for younger audience.
  • Choice between westernisation version and original names and references.
  • New Game + Option (if completed with minimum requirements)
  • Steam Cards.

Cons:
  • Music is short, lacks variation and obviously loops.
  • Average playthrough length dragged out by skill grinding, this is also made further problematic by the fact that certain conversation topics are far less useful than others and certain actions are quite pointless with little benefit.
  • Appalling westernisation version in spite of Ace Attorney inspiration.
  • Very little actual gameplay beyond "Go to location and select option" which quickly grows repetitive.
  • Very limited re-playability with the game easily completable in two playthroughs depending on which skills have been improved in the first playthrough.
  • Player feel like an observer to the character due to having next to no input on story events.
  • Money and items do not carry over in New Game +

TLDR: A wonderful example of what can be done with RPG Maker but with limited replay appeal and gameplay. Recommended as sales purchase.
If you'd like to see a more example of the game check out my video below:



Or alternatively the Lets Play can be be found Here


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MCM London Comic Con 2017: Part 1

Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: , , , , ,


Greetings and salutations once I again I return from MCM London with mixed but mostly positive results, for you long time readers you may remember that last year was my first time attending.

For those of you unaware of MCM, the MCM London Comic Con is a multi-genre fan convention held in the London Borough of Newham twice yearly, usually on the last weekend in May and October. Interests range from Anime to video Games, tabletop roleplay games to cinema it really is a varied event with talk panels, video game previews, various celebrations of eastern culture and more cosplayers than you can shake a stick at.

 A quieter moment of  MCM
   
Let me say now that I had intended to post this a little earlier in the month but upon my return home from the comic con left me wiped out and the growing stress on the election was a distraction to say the least.

Arriving at London unable to secure our previous hotel our group was staying at a shared apartment which in all honest turned out to be not only cheaper but also far nicer and closer to ExCeL London.
Now it must be stated that after the Manchester Bombing things were a little more tense on arrival this year with additional security everywhere but to their credit this did little to interrupt travel through the London.

Travelling to the ExCel via DLR on the Friday did come with its own set of problems with works under way at the Custom House stop, thankfully the organisers had foreseen this and arranged staff and directions at the following stop Prince Regent. While this was highly effective there was some confusion in staff instructions regarding allowing visitors to "Swipe Out" at the station causing issues with travel payments resulting in some overcharging costs for many people initially myself included.

This was thankfully rectified by some very kind and helpful people at Transport For London who had a brilliant support number and we highlighted the issue on the MCM facebook page with advice for others in the same predicament.

 The bag checking queue...

The security staff inside the ExCel were organised extremely well, courteous and generally well humoured to those in costume, even with hundreds of people streaming in the queues were kept short and were no more than 15 minutes. Later we discovered that initially there was intended backpack ban but with the hot weather the health risk of people not carrying bottled water and the general inconvenience to the public it was decided against. 

and the rest of it on the quiet Friday start.


Now to avoid simply reiterating my post from last year I am going to make a few comparisons to my previous experience:

The Map
  
Just to highlight what I said last year: 
 
I found the map near useless apart from from a general gist of the layout, just look below to see what I mean:

Front with map
 Back with panels and events
Now the astute amongst you may already notice something important missing from this map, that's right there is no key referring to the numbers listed on the stalls apart from the big name logos. In addition there is no reference to the ExCeL London own hall numbers or the entrance area so it is extremely easy to get turned around and disorientated due to the similarity of the stalls and lack of directions posted about.

There is a key but its inside the 140 page advert and article event magazine which also has a copy of the map located between pages 62 and 65, after another advert the key is listed BY ALPHABETICAL ORDER OF THE STALLS which is bloody useless unless you already know what stall your wanting to find beforehand. I'm looking at the damn key to find out what 471 is not the other way round. The panel event program is also a nightmare to find and read through in the magazine with information scattered between articles so at least the map was an improvement in this regard.
 In short just as bloody useless this year with all the same problems.

Stalls:

Thankfully far more variety this year, only a single major stall focused in Pop Figures much to my relief and while many of the stalls of the previous year returned there was far more variation between their stock. A few stalls did earn my ire however with blatant absurd pricing and lets just say if I was selling my PS1 game collection for the amounts they were charging  I would be a few thousands pounds better off.

 Pokemon plush were everywhere this year

CEX also didn't make a reappearance this year which was for the better, last year they had annoyed me with their loud music blaring out over the hall drowning out the various talks and panels and while GAME was there they didn't take up nearly as much space this year. Unfortunately also missing were table top roleplay stands as not a single one was available this year, but in their place the Lincoln Steam Punk Society had turned up much to my surprise and were advertising The Asylum Steampunk Festival later this year.   

All in all a major improvement from the year before especially since more of the hall was available this year there was far more space between the stalls so the horrible overcrowding of last year wasn't an issue at all much to my delight.

 Just a small amount of the manga on offer

I also ran into some old acquaintance from the Sheffield Space Centre, this was my main source of anime and manga growing up 15 years ago and it was great to see them still going strong today as they always stocked a large variety of comics, manga, anime, even figures, model kits and table top roleplaying games. It was great to see them with a stall at MCM London this year and I discovered yet another niche manga series through them Monster Hunter: Flash Hunter.
I highly recommend popping to their store if in Sheffield or checking out their website.

Video Games:

This year there were no major video game talk panels though a smaller stage had been set up by Rice Digital covering a handful of games, when generally this layout worked well the sound team really dropped the ball on the Saturday and a lot of the commentators were inaudible.

It would of also been easier to hear if the esports commentator just behind the panel had shut up for 5 minutes.
  
With this said there were two games there were two games covered that stood out to me:

Akiba's Beat:
Akiba's Beat is an action role-playing video game for the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4 video game consoles, a spiritual successor to Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed and the third game in the Akiba series its focus is to highlight the music culture of Akiba during its story.
In all honesty after the highly quirky arcade action and self acknowledging parody humour of the second game Akiba's Beat just came across as dull, slow paced and honestly rather boring in it mechanics, with very little originality that the series had previously been know for.
It seems that many other reviews agree with this observation.

      Advised Strong Language.


Project Rap Rabbit



Project Rap Rabbit is a global collaboration between Japanese developers NanaOn-Sha (PaRappa The Rapper, Vib-Ribbon) and iNiS Corporation (Gitaroo Man, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan), and UK-based publisher PQube Ltd.

Having developed some of the most revered music games of all time, they're committed to creating the greatest rhythm-action videogame in history with a new rapping adventure than infuses the best ideas from their past with innovative mechanics that  they hope will go on to shape the genre's future forevermore.

However not everything is going as planned as the Kickstarter for the project is woefully underfunded even with 2,549 backers only £129,806 of £855,000 goal has been reached and with only 10 days to go they have finally releasing a gameplay video of Rap Rabbit which is too little too late.

As one backer states:
Here's how this will go.
There will be this big unveiling of the gameplay video tomorrow. People from all over show up on this KS page as a result. They'll immediately notice that, after 3 weeks, the game is not even 20% funded, and that there's only a week and a half left to raise the remaining 80%. Maybe they'll hit that Remind Me button, but at the end of the day, they aren't gonna pledge.
Building up the Thunderclap, and hyping up the unveiling of the video, are both things that should have begun weeks before the campaign launched. Matsuura-san, Yano-san: PLEASE relaunch this campaign. Suspend it early so whatever resources you allocated to this one can be reallocated to the next one. But unless you have a massive E3 presence planned, there is no way this game is being funded with this particular campaign.

As a backer myself I totally agree with this prediction, there has been a complete failure to market the game to the community or the gaming media, I MYSELF have made seeming the only post on Reddit about the project (at the time of my posting) and I can help but feel that somewhere along the line the PR just flopped.


Just behind the Digital Rice Panel

Other than Digital Rice the Esports community really were making a hit with Tekken 7 with a massive set-up and tournament over the weekend and Guilty Gear XRD Rev 2 was making its own impact on its admittedly much smaller collection of consoles. The halls also boasted various arcade machine set ups with a one company selling the cabinets it was displaying, though I think the real moment that stole it was the Gandalf V.s. Gimli on the dance machines.



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Having looked at the sequel Hax Monster steps back to discuss Hotline Miami.

Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: , ,



This review contains spoilers of Hotline Miami throughout. If you haven’t played it yet, all you need to know is that it earns a solid recommendation from me. However, I want to be free in pointing out the beauty of the game’s story and the way it transfers it. It’s cheap, runs on any PC and is short, so there are no excuses: play it and then come back. For the used interpretation of the plot of this game I have used something Rami ‘vlambeer’ Ismail’ wrote on the internet on this game. 
 
One wonderful ability that I share with any creator of any written text, work of art or intellectual work in general is that I know at least one thing about you. I don’t know if your name is Victor or Josh (although it would be funny if that happened to be the case), if you like your eggs soft- or hard-boiled or whether or not you just elected for US president the most unsuitable person for governance since emperor Nero, but I do know that you are reading my text. And since I know this text will most likely only be seen on the Sword and Torch Inn website, I know at the very least that you are using either a PC, tablet device or smartphone to view my work. I know you are using an internet browser as well. This might seem obvious, but the beautiful thing is that I can use that to my advantage. 
 
I can use the limitations of the medium that is used to transfer what I have created more effectively. Post-modernistic art tended to do something like this quite often: reminding the audience, reader or viewer of a work that they are viewing or reading something to take them out of the experience on purpose. Another example is the last song of Slipknots ‘All Hope Is Gone’ record, which purposefully starts breaking up in a way that sounds as if the CD is scratched to pieces. Video games offer beautiful possibilities in this area, since the person enjoying the work directly interacts with it and is therefore more immersed than Atlantis after a major sewer clogging. Perhaps the most beautiful example of a game using this for its narrative is Hotline Miami, without a colon, since the second one wasn’t called Hotline: Stoke On Trent or something. Although I do notice I keep making typing mistakes, writing it as ‘Hoeline Miami’, which could either be an escort service or a company selling farming equipment over the phone. 

 
Anyway, Hotline Miami is a high-paced psychedelic over-the-top top-down violent fighting game where your answering machine cryptically instructs you to go to various locations in 1980’s Miami and slaughter armed dudes. Every level starts with you getting out of bed in your messy apartment, walking over to the phone and receiving a message that, in convoluted terms, tells you to go somewhere and take care of business. Then, you proceed to do so and as soon as you leave the building, blood clinging to your shoes, the game cuts to a shop, bar or pizza place and lets you do a mundane, every-day activity, such as buying a drink or ordering pizza. This applies to nearly every chapter, with the only interruptions being dream sequences where a horse, rooster and owl speak to you in respectively a soothing, authorative and resentful tone. 
 
Describing the gameplay on paper doesn’t really allow me to describe its depth, not surprising for a two-dimensional medium, so don’t judge too early if the mechanics I’m about to walk you through sound extremely standard and boring. You move around the level from a top-down perspective and can punch enemies to knock them on the floor. Once they are down you can perform a finishing move of one brief second. You can also pick up melee weapons which all are instant kills and can be thrown. Some weapons, like knives, are also lethal when flung at the enemy. Others merely knock them down. There are also guns, which have only one clip that can’t be reloaded. Finally, you can knock people down by throwing doors in their face and there are windows that your foes can see through. That’s it, really. One level mixes things up with metal detectors that alert everyone if you walk through them with a gun but, on paper, the gameplay is run of the mill at its finest. But ‘seemingly simple’ doesn’t mean ‘bad’. One can easily mock a Barett Newman painting as something a household painter and decorator could make within three minutes, until you find yourself in the Museum of Modern Art, five centimetres away from it, and find yourself inexplicably drawn in.


The simple gameplay is what allows the game to convey its message. The reason for this is that H:M’s gameplay has something in common with Guitar hero, and not only the fact that you obliterate small, brightly-coloured objects with satisfying sound as a result. Like Guitar Hero, you can only play Warmthread Las Vegas by not thinking about it. If you consciously try to aim your attacks and estimate the size of your ambiguous hitbox, you will end up with more metal in your head than Punished ‘Venom’ Snake. This partially has to do with the behaviour of the AI in that it is impossible to get NPC’s to behave consistently. Because of this, you can’t rely on a plan when it comes to luring enemies or predicting their path. Planning, therefore, is a no-go. The key is to completely trust your intuition and get into a certain flow and, all of a sudden, everything works out. You will manage to somehow throw a club in someone’s face while sprinting through a door, finishing the two enemies you door-slammed in the process, grab the gun of one of them, shoot an incoming attack dog and then shoot the first guy you club-faced before he can get up, all in under four seconds. 

But it is more trance-inducing than visiting a pop-art exhibition while on LSD, also thanks to the game’s superbly hypnotizing 80’s synthesizer soundtrack. Then, however, the moment the last lifeless body thumps to the ground, you immediately come down from your killing spree. Then the game does something that seems arbitrary but is actually very important: it forces you to walk back to your car at the start of the level with all the damage, blood and broken glass still lying around. Meanwhile, the funky synthesizer tunes are replaced with one eerie consistent tone. You are confronted with your wrongdoing and all of it hits extra hard because the game didn’t give you time to think about it during the fight. 


 
As I mentioned earlier, after each of these fights you go to a normal place and do a normal thing and this offers a frame of reference against which the massacres still stay extreme and horrifying. If Call of Duty or modern day television taught us anything it’s that horrifying violence can easily be the norm if it is all you show (Listen to Tool’s song ‘Vicarious’ or Meshuggah’s ‘Obzen’ if you want to know what I mean), so cleverly Hotline Miami gives us something to contrast that. But these scenes also serve to show how your character becomes more and more nutty as time goes on. First, subtle clues interrupt the mundanity of these little slices of daily life, but before you realize it you’ll be talking to walking corpses that may or may not have been killed by you a few levels ago and that is the point after which there is no return from Bonkersburg. 
 
As the insanity piles up and the pixel blood keeps flowing, you are confronted by the three animals in the dream sequences with your wrongdoing. But nothing changes. It’s still: another day, another answer machine, another massacre, another news story that the NRA can spin to promote gun usage. Finally, you reach the boss of all the dudes that you bested thusfar. As you walk in, he says he expected you. Then you shoot him, smoke a cigarette, end of story. Anticlimactic, isn’t it?

But wait! There’s more!

As a short first credit roll finishes, time is reversed and we find ourselves around the time of the earlier levels we played. Now, however, the player character is a tough-looking biker, his head obscured by a helmet. Then some more missions follow as we play as this unknown character who, maybe because of his sound-isolating helmet, is no blind slave to the answering machine. He commits his massacres on his own accord to find the source behind the murder-messages. After all, this was the 1980’s, where internet trolling did not exist yet and someone sending you homicidal messages on a regular basis was actually a thing people took seriously!


The biker levels are a bit more annoying than the previous ones, since the biker can’t pick up weapons or guns or throw things. All he uses is one meat cleaver and three throwing knives that you can pick up after use. My beef with this is that this goes against the spirit of the game’s supersonic intuitive gameplay that was the strength of the previous half. You can’t improvise much and now have to plan every knife throw because some situations can only be resolved with a ranged weapon. 
 
But as soon as you overcome all that you can come to the haunting conclusion of the messages and that is where the tricks of using your art form artfully I mentioned earlier. Because the mind-boggling thing is that the person sending you those answer messages and telling you to kill is the same person that tells you to kill in Call of Duty or Battlefield. Is he a boring, stern military commander? Not at all: the person telling you to kill is, as in any game, the game’s developer. The biker’s quest leads us to a shabby basement where we find two figures, looking like the developers of the game. The biker then asks them if they think this is some kind of sick game, sending out massacre-encouragements across the city. And the brilliant reply is: Don’t you think this is a game? You ARE playing a game right now, aren’t you? Are you having fun? With this subtle but groundshaking bit of fourth-wall-breaking everything falls into place and the banality of a game’s developer essentially making you kill on command becomes painfully clear. With this, Hennes Maurits brings beautiful criticism towards violence in video games and, considering the trance it brings you in it its most violent moments, the manner in which people perceive or deal with violence.


The game has three big gaping flaws. The first is the mask system. Throughout all of your genocide runs you wear an animal mask and all of them, except for the starting one, give you gameplay bonuses that vary from silenced guns to lethal door smashes. However, there is one that rules them all, which is the one that makes your fists kill enemies instantaneously and makes finishing moves instant as well. The latter might seem pointless, since finishing someone only takes one second, but the pace is higher than that of a Dragonforce song on fast-forward and that means that finishers can be the difference between life and death, and not only the life or death of the downed NPC. 

The second big gaping flaw is the hospital level. At one point as we still play as the first character, we are arrested and end up in hospital. There, we have to sneak out without being spotted by doctors or the police holding us there. I normally wouldn’t mind an attempt to mix gameplay styles up and it is better to have us leave the hospital without resorting to cutscene, but the problem is that Heisslinien Hamburg has controls and visuals only really suitable for over-the-top violent massacring gameplay and not for sneaky stealth sections. It would have been better if this sequence had been nothing more than the player walking through a corridor without there being a chance of getting caught. One little detail I liked was that, during this chapter, moving too fast or too much causes your character to get a headache which is conveyed through visuals and audio in a way that brings across the feeling of a suddenly rising headache quite well. I like that we feel some vulnerability for the first time in the game because that raises the steaks and reminds us of the slight bit of humanity left in our mute, faceless, nameless protagonist. 

Then there is the final flaw and never has such a minor flaw had such horrible implications as in this case. The problem is that the beautiful conversation with the ‘developers’ I mentioned earlier has dialogue trees, which is for the very first time in the entire game. There seems to be no reason for it and there is no real choice involved beyond what the characters are going to say next. The horrible thing is that the grand, revolutionary twist in which the developers draw the attention of the player to the fact that he is merely playing a game doesn’t come up if you pick the wrong dialogue choice. And that is how a dialogue tree can uproot your entire game in under two seconds. 

 
Videogames are a beautiful art form and, with their interactivity, can do things that no other medium can pull off. The problem is that the greatest works of gaming art created, such as Killer7, Hotline Miami or Spec Ops: The Line are buried under the endless pile of Call of Duty’s Battlefields and League of Legends’s. Funnily enough, Hotline: Miami was itself buried by its sequel. For more information on that, read my review of that game. It suffices to say that there was no need for a sequel and that the sequel only goes through the same motions as the predecessor to ring a few more pennies. It introduced nothing except poor gameplay design, bugs and a bloated, inefficiently designed story. And thus the story was concluded of probably the best indie game I ever played. Let’s enjoy it now before they release a movie, book, tea towel and maybe also a constipation aid bearing its name to earn even more money!


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I still don't believe he bought a physical copy of it, Hax Monster reviews Ride to Hell Retribution known at the worst game ever!

Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: , , ,




Writing game reviews is always partly a matter of fact and partly a matter of opinion. One can surely argue a game’s quality based on subjective matters, like atmosphere and story. Sometimes, however, you can rely on objective matters to defend your point of view, which mostly has to do with the game’s functionality or originality. The latter is very much preferable, because you can make a way more certain case. I find myself in that comfortable position right now, reviewing Ride to Hell Retribution, also known as the worst game ever.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Know the face of the beast.

The quality of this game has reached such a low point that the amazement is less about how the developers could make such horrible mistakes and more about how no one apparently raised the question if perhaps this abomination should be cancelled to save developer Eutechnyx’s dignity. After all, it does not take a trained eye to discover the gullibility in the first minute of gameplay. 

Considering that this game is so bad that a standard reviewing structure won’t be very practical here, I decided the best way to review Ride to Hell was to first list the few things that the game did not do poorly, as well as the possibilities that the game had as a concept, after which I’ll list the most prominent failures. I can unfortunately not mention all of them, because my review’s reading time would outlast the game’s miserable runtime.

 This could of a way of exploring the desire for freedom but what we got was every horrible element from the life.

Firstly, the game had some good potential in the conceptual stages of development. Since there are not so many games set in the 1960’s and since a biker game could be cool it makes sense that the devs wanted to make something like that. Prior to release there was talk of Ride to Hell being an open world sandbox where you could explore the American motorways in a true biker-gang style. That would be awesome, for sure. Ride to Hell is no sandbox and offers no freedom, but if it had been that many would have appreciated it. It would have had an original setting and time period, as well as gameplay that would fit the setting well. 
 
And even though some will certainly disagree with me, there are a few things that the game does do well. Most of them are hard to spot because failures pile up on them like leaves during autumn, but in those little pieces you can see the shine of the diamond that was the concept. Most prominently, the game offers nice variation. The hub-based mission gameplay switches between biker-driving sections, sometimes intermixed with combat, melee combat sections and cover-based shooting. In between all of that you can spend time in the microscopic hub town where you can buy upgrades and modify your motorbike. 


 No Saints Row 3 but I see the possibilities.

Bike modification is the third bit the game did well. There are plenty of options and styles for your wheels and everything fits nicely into place. The final upside are the bright graphics, which make the world look colourful and pleasant. The graphics are by no means good, but the colour scheme gives everything a pleasant feel.

Now that we are done with the four only points that are in the slightest bit positive, let me give you an impression of the vastness of this abominable failure. 
 
Firstly, the game is hideously broken. Glitches are everywhere and often quite hilarious. On one occasion, I head shot an enemy which caused him to fly into the distance like an emptying balloon. Another enemy suddenly had his bottom half several meters away from his top half, while the two were still connected by a narrow little stretch of body. An animation that was meant to demonstrate a newly unlocked melee combo to me bugged after which my character, which was supposed to execute the combo, was standing inside the target of said combo. Ragdolls get stuck in either props or in the world geometry all the time. 

On another occasion, the unintuitive level design caused me to lose my way. Then a message came up saying that ‘all enemies in the area are dead’, meaning that I have no reason to loiter. For whatever reason that text never went away that mission. And some other time I switched from my dynamite sticks to my assault rifle, after which the dynamite model did not go away and got stuck in my rifle. 

Finally, the most important cutscene in the first half of the game has only half the sound effects it should have, and what should have been an exciting moment loses something if you hear nothing save the ambient noise of the environment. These are by far not all bugs, but hopefully this gives you some impression of how many there are. The weird thing is that this game is not broken in the same way as, say, Big Rigs over the Road Racing was, because you can play all the way through this without problems. Game breaking glitches are the only kind that Ride to Hell does not have. 
 
The next issue the game has is misogyny. To complete the stereotypical biker image seen In this game there has to be plenty of sex, the developers thought, so consequently you have sex with more than half of the members of the opposite sex you meet. Often such encounters take place when you find a lady, dressed in the most oversexed way possible, sexually harassed by a few men. Then you shoot all of them in the head after which you are rewarded with a rather unsettling show of the protagonist, Jake, rubbing his crotch against said lady while both are still fully clothed. 

Just look at their faces, it looks like both of them regret doing this.

Most of the times this take place less than half a meter away from the corpses of those harassing men you shot in the head a few seconds earlier. What makes it even weirder is that there are only four female models for about ten encounters, so it almost seems as if we come across the same women two or three times for whatever reason. None of this adds anything at all and solely exists to satisfy the three-year-old that came up with this stupid idea.

I mentioned that it was a good thing that occasionally there are some biking sections. It is nice that the game has them, but in all other respects they are a massive nuisance. Often these sequences mean you have to chase someone and in order to make sure you can always catch up with someone, your speed is always higher than that of your target. However, the game does not want you to get to him before the end of the sequence, so when you get too close the hand of god pushes your goal away from you with noticeable force. That kind of puppet-master interference should not be visible at all. 

 Why did this guy seeming explode into more blood than he can possible have?

What is most striking with the biking is how you die in them. You can fail them by crashing into things, but unlike a sensible game that would make the player die on impact, Ride to Hell takes a different approach. You can fail up to three times and every time you hit something, even if it is just a scrape, the game waits just long enough for you to think you can resume your drive and then fades the screen out. You are then restarted a hundred meters back. When this happens the third time you would think that you would just die and fail, right? Wrong. When you fail the last time, the game waits a few seconds again, then restarts you. Now however, you have no control over your character and the game pushes your bike into the ditch. You explode. You die. End. So rather than making you fail on its own, the game restarts you and makes you die again, as if to rub it in one more time, and the delay of a few seconds between hitting something is very annoying, because now the pace or the race is not only broken by your own crash, but also by the respawning which happens just when you have gotten back up to speed. And when you die, the game does not restart but brings you to the pause menu where every option except loading the save again is blocked. That is not particularly streamlined design,

The fact that Ride to Hell was released on PC almost seems like a mistake, considering that the ‘video’ tab in the options menu only lets you toggle subtitles and fullscreen and lets you adjust the brightness. Also, you are only allowed to select preset control setups, rather than being able to adjust everything freely. That is especially frustrating considering that standard controls are unintuitive and irritating to use. Most control options only relate to controllers anyway, considering that you can adjust sensitivity but not, say, whether you want to hold the mouse to aim or if you want to toggle aim with it. It is evident that, apart from the fullscreen option, the entire thing was just hauled over from the console port without adjustment. However, I don’t think graphical options would have added anything, because the game looks horrible anyway. Textures only load after one second of gameplay, the textures have a very low resolution and there are next to no effects. The only effects are blood, and that is overdone to the point that punching someone’s shoulder looks like you had a jam jar taped to your knuckles when you hit him.

If the earlier example wasn't enough for you.

Then there is the voice acting, which comes across as either completely disinterested or extremely overdone. Some enemies that are supposed to say angry or intimidating things while fighting you sound more like they express their annoyance over having spilled their coffee, while others groan out their lines like they are simultaneously passing a kidney stone. 
  
Then there is the melee combat. Although it is nice variation, the entire system is completely broken because the attack that is meant to just break the enemy’s block is the only one you need. That kicking attack breaks the enemy’s block, stops any attack they are executing and does damage as well. You can probably already tell that doing the can-can on anyone for a few seconds kills anyone without issue. You would be right, and you would probably not work at Eutechnyx. I played through an entire chapter, which is only melee combat, with just this attack and when the QTE’s came up I just rubbed over my keyboard randomly, as the game does not fail a quick-time-event if you press the wrong button. Beyond this there are unlockable combo’s, but their explanation was bugged up so I had not the faintest clue how to use them. Also there is a counter move which is about as overpowered as the kick attack, so the entire melee half of the game just ends up as a coffee break in between the driving and shooting.

 Obviously this guy hasn't discovered the wonder of kicks yet.
And shooting is a challenge indeed. Any sense of balance in this respect of the combat has been thrown out the window and was then run over by a truck carrying leaking barrels of nuclear waste. You have the choice, like in most games, to take out enemies with multiple body shots or one headshot. What is new here is that you would need fifteen shots to the chest, which mostly are three magazines, to kill anyone. Consequently I only killed two people that way, and that was just to count how much it would take. The frustration of headshotting is that whenever you make a headshot, or blow up an explodable barrel, the game goes into slow-motion bullet time for about a quarter of a second. I will admit that it was satisfying when I once managed to chain together a few headshots using this slow-motion period but the hundreds of other times it was just annoying. Usually the time window is way to short to be helpful, especially with explosions.
And there is more. Everyone has hair that looks like mashed paper and which often collides with their head or shoulders. The soundtrack consists of extremely repetitive tracks with always the same kind of horrible wailing for vocals. The reload animation for the gun turret looks like I’m waving my hand at some enemy as if I think I might know him. Every time a loading screen is complete the game waits for you to press the enter key, which always delays the load a few seconds because of that the message that the load is over is a bit hard to notice. 
 
So, Ride to Hell is bad. No surprise there, considering that it is already two years old by now. What is nice about it is that this game is the fun kind of bad. It is not like Big Rigs, which is bad because it outright does not work, but it is fun because of that it makes every bad decision it ever could make. I spent the first few hours of this game laughing at everything new I found and I don’t believe I ever laughed more. This is the kind of bad you just need to see, and unlike a game such as Goat Simulator this was not meant to be horrible and because of that Retribution takes itself seriously it just gets better and better. 

Steam took this title down, unfortunately, but if you can get it I would recommend that you try it. This might be a bad game, but if they changed the official genre from ‘action-adventure’ to ‘comedy’ it would have been a game of the year contender for sure.


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